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Archive for the ‘Car’ Category

I’m a huge fan of “The Prisoner,” a British tele series from the late 1960s which I watched when I was a toddler. I was probably too young for that matter, as it has marked me for life. “I am not a number!” was a favorite quote of mine throughout childhood and I still use it from time to time. It came to mind as I was reading all the numbers I have been assigned by a spam e-mail which wormed its way out of the bulk mail filters and into my inbox. The nerve of these spam e-mails, really!

I have been assigned a reference number, a ticket number, a lucky number (oooh, lucky me!) and a serial number. There’s also an international number to call! But I don’t think I’ll be calling it. They want INFORMATION! INFORMATION! But who is their Number 1? That would be telling! Who is Number 2?

I AM NOT A NUMBER! I am a free woman! I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, NUMBERED OR SPAMMED!

Here’s the series introduction:

When the prisoner wakes up, he finds himself in The Village.

Here’s The Village and its architectural history as documented by “The Antiques Road Show”:

If you’re interested in the DVD boxed set of the complete 17-episode series, it’s available here.

I never make New Year’s Resolutions other than resolving NOT to make resolutions! Here’s 13 reasons why the top 13 resolutions around the world fail.

Lose weight: Doomed from the start because it’s almost impossible to escape corn syrup. It’s in everything! Statistics show that weight gain in the United States has gone up 4000 percent since the 1970s and it correlates exactly with the 4000% increase in manufacturers’ use of corn syrup since the 1970s. Corn syrup also increases cravings!!

Exercise: Most people are too tired all day to exercise and when you add to the equation that you have to drive both to and from the gym (in my case it would be a 25 mile round trip to the nearest gym) it makes the whole thing futile unless you can give all of us a few more hours in the day.

Diet: We all have the best intentions until our ALREADY STARVED stomachs get tempted by the aroma of pizza or warm chocolate chip cookies.

Write to far away relatives: Tomorrow I’ll write to my aunt, but when tomorrow comes, well my dear, Scarlett said it best, “Tomorrow is another day!”

Be a better spouse/child/friend: If we couldn’t do it on Thanksgiving or on Christmas Day, what makes you think that we can miraculously do it by procrastinating waiting until January 1.

Stop procrastinating: Some people do procrastinate because they just don’t want to do something, but most of the time, people just don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish everything on the TO DO list. Give all of us another few more hours in the day AND the energy to do it, and I guarantee you we’ll all procrastinate a whole lot less. Until then, that resolution is guaranteed to be broken quickly.

Get more sleep: If you live in the city, be sure to pass a law forbidding garbage trucks to stagnate under your window and beep when they back out with a 13-point turn. While you’re at it, pass a law to forbid all traffic, all honking, all loud neighbors, all barking dogs until after you have woken up on your own and are well-rested. If you live in the country, make sure the rooster is blind and your neighbor has agreed to milk the cows and do all your morning chores. And above all, regardless of where you live, be absolutely sure that you do not have any children under the age of 50.

Keep a clean home: Unless you want to get rid of the dirt-tracking, slobbering dog, get rid of the germ-carrying, toy-scattering kids, maybe even the food-eating, clothe-wearing spouse, that’s going to be a tough one. Even at the Carlsbad caves in New Mexico, they have to spend thousands of volunteer hours dusting and picking dirt and lint out of the stalagmites each year and nobody even lives there. You do LIVE in your house, don’t you?

Quite smoking/drinking/and God-forbid taking drugs: These are all substances which affect your brain receptors. You not only have to get rid of a nasty habit, but you have to get your brain and your physiology to stop reacting. With very hard work and lots of will-power you might be able to quit, but your body will always be addicted. It would be much easier to resolve to never use and abuse these substances in the first place.

Reduce stress overall: LOL! LOL! When I hear people say that it reduces MY stress because it makes me laugh so much. Of course this is probably the easiest resolution to achieve. All you have to do is die and go to Heaven. That’s all. Now, be careful! Make sure you DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT, commit suicide under any circumstance, because then you’ll die and go to hell!

Reduce stress at work: If you work with people, it’s impossible. Unless maybe if you work with French people, because I seem to recall Napoleon saying “Impossible is not French.” You can’t work with machines or robots because they are designed and programed by people. Now maybe if you want to follow in Jane Goodall’s footsteps and go to the jungle to live with animals. They say animals reduce stress — as long as they’re not trying to eat you!

Get out of debt: First thing is to sell your house because a mortgage is a 30-year debt. Sell your car too since you don’t want car payments. Cut up your credit cards which will of course wreck your credit score, but that’s OK since you don’t want any debt.

Save money: That is another way of saying join the rat race, because to save money you have to earn money with a job and you have to work your little rat wheel faster than INFLATION. Also, don’t believe all those commercials that say you can save money if you go to their stores, because what they conveniently forget to tell you is that to save that money, you have to spend money first, so you’ll have to stat in that giant rat race.

If I didn’t deter you from making resolutions, just remember that it takes at least three weeks to form a good habit, so don’t give up before then, and best of luck and Happy New Year to you and yours!

Here are my picks for a 21st Century Holiday Shopping List, and you can shop right here from the Internet and not have to fight for a parking spot at the mall. Just click on the links to see more and to purchase.

Music Downloads The teens and music lovers will enjoy Amazon’s new music downloads for their iPods, MP3 players, cell phones and other musical gadgets. Starting at only 89 to 99 cents per download, it’s in anybody’s price range and can be given even to paperboys (do they still exist??), teen gardeners, babysitters and others you want to recognize with a gift but don’t want to spend a fortune on. Your own kids will love a more generous download amount, and you will love this clutter-free gift which won’t be sitting around your home gathering dust.

Video Downloads Forget driving to the video store or messing with mail order video memberships. Now you can download your videos straight from your computer. Video downloads can be either rented or purchased from Amazon, a trusted Internet source for years, not a new fly-by-night company you’ve never heard of before.

Planet Earth – The Complete BBC Series is “a tour de force … a masterpiece,” wrote the New York Times. Using revolutionary new filming techniques, with a budget of more than $25 million, “Planet Earth” is the epic story of life on Earth as you’ve never seen it before. The Chicago Times praised it as “an absolutely extraordinary achievement.” Five years in the making, using 40 cameramen spanning 200 locations, this 11-part series is hailed as the ultimate portrait of our planet. It also features a 150-minute documentary about our future. “Simply radiant” said Entertainment Weekly and “breathtaking” according to Time Magazine.

The Bible Experience: Old Testament (Inspired By) You can no longer say the Bible is boring or that you don’t have the time. Now you can be entertained during your long commute by an unprecedented cast of more than 400 actors, musicians and clergy, including Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Bishop T.D. Jakes, LL Cool J, Forest Whittaker, etc. in this dramatic audio recording of the Bible. Even the youngest child can “read” the Bible by listening to the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Complete Bible and the whole family can gather around, too. This audio Bible is from Zondervan, the world’s leading Bible publisher.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT This is much more than a toy, it is science lessons in a box and was recommended to our son by his science teacher, a research scientist who participates each year in the DARPA Urban Challenge with Autonomous Robot Cars. Mindstorms is exciting for children and teens (adults too) and will nurture their curiosity. Parents will love that it’s not some mindless, brain-rotting toy. If you missed the posts about the Urban Challenge, you can click here and here to learn about the cars that drive themselves and will be picking up our groceries in the very near future.

iRobot 560 Roomba Vacuuming Robot, Black and Silver The Jetsons have finally arrived. This round vacuum may not look like a robot, but it will automatically vacuum your home, spend extra time in the dirtiest spots and return to one of its two battery chargers to ready itself for the next clean up and you won’t have to lift a finger. Spend the extra time laughing with your children, cozying up with your spouse or pampering yourself.

This great carnival of shopping list ideas was thought of by Chili at Don’t Try It, where the rest of the participants are listed.

I hope all of you reading this post realize just how exciting this all is. Our 10-year-old son is quite excited that his very own science teacher competes in the Pentagon’s DARPA Challenge each year. This is the third challenge. Nobody won in 2004, and Stanford won the $2 million first prize last year.

Our son, who already wanted to be a scientist to follow in his Grandpa’s impressive footsteps, is even more energized now that he has seen and touched his teacher’s autonomous robotic car.

His teacher tells us that not only will these “auto-mobiles” be used for military purposes such as transport through danger zones (DARPA’s goal is by 2015), but much sooner than we think, we’ll be able to tell our cars to go pick up the milk for us at the grocery store. This is not science-fiction fantasies, it is our own near future.

Already car makers are fine-tuning driver assistance systems where the car is constantly monitoring the road for the driver, warning the driver of hazards and as soon as the driver touches the brakes, the car applies the brakes at just the necessary pressure.

We hope to get many more details at our son’s next science class, but in the meantime, you can watch the video and look at pictures on DARPA’s Web site.

All the science and technology media are writing about it too. You can check out WIRED and Popular Mechanics‘ numerous articles and blog posts on their Web sites.

And if you didn’t read my previous post on Oct. 26, 2007 about autonomous cars, be sure to check it out FIRST. It will give you all the basics to understand what it’s all about.

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Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

Brand new mommies have lots of worries and concerns when their children are born. One of mine was that our son would remove his car seatbelt without my knowledge as soon as he was old enough to do so. Lots of children do.

I thought about what I could possibly do or say to keep him safe, and I remembered something my mom had once told me that my grandfather would do long before seat belts were even invented.

My grandfather would tell his five children that if things became rowdy in the back seat, the car could not drive. At the first child’s misbehavior, he would pull the car over and the car would not drive until the children quieted down. After one or two trips to the side of the road, my grandfather quickly found himself with a carload of quiet, well-behaved children who were helping the car to drive.

I told our son the same thing, adding the fastened seatbelt clause. I started him from babyhood. He tested the theory a couple of times by acting up or complaining that the seatbelt was not comfortable, but the car immediately pulled to the side of the road and refused to start until all was quiet again. By the time he was old enough to understand that the seatbelt did not have any effect whatsoever on the car, he was fully trained and used to his seatbelt. As a matter of fact, by that time he had become quite vigilant about mandatory seatbelts for everyone at all times, commenting on people who do not wear their seatbelts.

I never was more thankful I had done that all these years than when my worry became a real life nightmare and perpetual agony for our son’s swim coach. While returning home from a camping trip with her 10 children, she had a car accident. The coach and nine of the children were wearing seatbelts and were not hurt. The youngest child, my son’s age, on his swim team and a schoolmate, had taken off her seatbelt, apparently to sleep more comfortably. She flew through the van’s windshield, spent a short time at the children’s hospital with severe brain damage and other injuries, and is now a little angel in heaven.

So please make sure your children are wearing their seatbelts. Be a good role model to them by wearing yours as well, and I hope that my tip will help you to keep children and future children safe. This tip really does work, so please for life’s sake, spread the word.

On a happier note, please visit Shannon at Rocks in My Dryer for a list of all the participants in this week’s Works For Me Wednesday meme.

As I turned on the TV news today, I was bombarded with recall after recall. On the headlines: infant cold and cough medicine with even the big names like Tylenol, more pot pies, more toys including Mattel again, baby strollers, carriers, etc. with Winnie the Pooh and made in Korea, lipsticks including name brands like L’Oreal and Dior with the prestige of Paris, but actually subcontracted just like Mattel, and the list went on too.

So what’s happening here? Are the government agencies more stringent than they have been in the past and these recalls would have been under the radar until now? Have companies gone insane and they are trying to kill consumers, the very hand that feeds them? Have some evil forces or the 9/11 Terrorists infiltrated even our formerly most trusted name brands in an attempt to kill even our youngest and our psyches? Are Communist countries like China behind it all?

None of it makes sense, but one thing is sure, the enemy, whoever it may be, is lurking behind every product these days.

Forget saving money at the local dollar store or discount outlet. You’ll surely be putting your life at stake with just about every product there being made in China.

As my grandmother used to say, “we don’t know what to eat and drink anymore.” And what was true then, is mind boggling now. And now add “we don’t know what to breathe anymore” too, because even the smell of popcorn is killing us. (See my related blog post.)

It’s no solution for those of us living in cities, but if things don’t get better soon, at this rate, I foresee having to grow our own food, make our own toys, revert back to milk paint, feed our pets people food — actually with our own dog having been killed by the last pet food recall, we’re ALREADY doing that!

It’s a scary world out there. Self-sufficiency is starting to look good not just to wackos, but to the rest of us too. Horse and buggy here we come!

I always have on hand some plastic grocery bags in my car. Over the years I have reused them in all sorts of ways.

Garbage gets tossed quickly and easily instead of being scattered throughout the car. When baby gets car sick, the soiled outfit goes in a plastic bag or two and the smell is contained too. No need for a Diaper Genie in the car, just use a couple plastic grocery bags until you get to the nearest garbage can.

When there’s an impromptu trip to the beach, wet bathing suits or seashells, rocks and other treasures go right in too. Car trouble or something dirty to touch, a bag becomes a plastic mitten. If a child walks into mud, the shoes and socks can go in the bag, too.

Toys, especially balls which can get very dirty, can easily be carried by the child to the park from the parking lot. The dirty balls or sandy toys won’t soil a good canvas tote bag or basket. They can be used as a temporary tossable liner as well.

I’m always finding a new use for them and it’s good for our environment to reuse. It actually saves money, energy and time to reuse before recycling.